In the known state of the art, modern wireless communication systems depend on multiple input multiple output (MIMO) communication systems which allow for significant improvements in channel capacity and error performance compared to single transmit and single receive antenna systems. Use of multiple input multiple output (MIMO) communication systems allow for the improvement of capacity and reliability. In multicarrier communication, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems eliminate the need to utilize complex equalizers by parsing high speed data strings and transmit them over multiple orthogonal subcarriers. Due to being able to cope with inter-symbol interference efficiently and to minimize the distorting effects of the channel, the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) technology is used in integration with the multiple input multiple output (MIMO) technology within the current wireless communication standards. Multiple input multiple output orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) systems utilize spatial multiplexing (V-BLAST) techniques in order to reach high data speeds. However, due to the use of linear filtering methods with low complexity, such as zero forcing (ZF) or minimum mean square error (MMSE) estimator, the diversity effect of the multiple input multiple output (MIMO) channels are removed and the desired decrease in signal to noise ratios necessary for reaching the target bit error ratios are not achieved.
Thus, these type of multiple input multiple output orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) systems are not able to fully utilize the communication characteristics of multiple input multiple output (MIMO) channels. Due to not having the flexibility and dynamic working structure which may be necessary in 5G networks and due to the fact that information can only be transferred in modulated symbols in subcarriers, it cannot provide a trade-off between spectral efficiency and error performance. Multiple input multiple output (MIMO) and orthogonal frequency division multiplexing with index modulation (OFDM-IM) techniques are not used in tandem for 5G networks.
The studies that can be relevant to the invention can be summarized as follows. Document D1 considers a similar design issue combining MIMO communications systems with OFDM-IM. However, only a single mapping scheme was proposed in D1 that can achieve a very limited spectral efficiency. Furthermore, the minimum mean squared error (MMSE) based detector of D1 does not consider the statistics of the MMSE filtered signals and detects the active subcarriers by the measured subcarrier powers independently from the data symbols carried over the active subcarriers; as a result, it provides a suboptimal solution. Despite the fact that both the detector of D1 and the proposed two detectors of the invention are based on MMSE equalizations, their operation principles are considerably different and these different detectors can provide different system performances. Document D2 considers a single input single output (SISO) OFDM-IM scheme for frequency selective fading channels in the presence of high mobility. MMSE equalization is used to eliminate the interference between different subcarriers due to mobility and LLR calculation is used to detect the active indices. Document D3 considers block interleaving of subcarriers for SISO type OFDM-IM. Document D4 is the landmark study that is also performed by the Inventor and proposed OFDM-IM for SISO frequency selective fading systems by considering maximum likelihood and log-likelihood ratio (LLR) detection.